Rig to Assembly

Rig to Assembly turns a tree or branch grown in Natsura into an assembly library. A branch module you grow and decorate in one Simulate, with procedural bark and placed assemblies, can then decorate another tree through an Assembly Decoration. It is on the toolbar's Assemblies menu.

Setting one up

Wire the Simulate into Rig to Assembly. One wire carries the tree and its rig. Wire Rig to Assembly into an Assembly Decoration's first input, then open the decoration's chart and put the new parts on it: Reset clears the old parts off, and dragging the module onto the chart places it everywhere. Switch the Simulate selector on the display toolbar from the preview tree to your real tree to judge the scale; a module is usually much larger than a kit's parts.

What it shows

Rig to Assembly breaks the module down into the instances it is made of: the parts the module's own Assembly Decoration placed, a new instance for the procedural geometry it grew, and the rigged result. Each unique assembly it finds becomes a part of the library. Colour shades the result by u, assembly or instance, so you can see where each instance sits in its assembly. Display Rig, Display Pivots and Display Geometry show or hide the rig, the pivots and the mesh.

Like the simulation, the result carries u, which is how an Assembly Decoration bends the part along its hierarchy. Play the timeline: if the breakdown moves cleanly in the preview wind, the assemblies are set up correctly and will respond to effectors on the Assembly Decoration and to wind in Unreal.

Settings

Export picks what goes out: Source & Modules (the default), Source, or Modules. Transform sets the result's Rotate (0, -90, 0 by default) and Uniform Scale. Instancify controls how the grown geometry is cut into instances.

Status

Rig to Assembly is new and its controls are likely to change. The Carve and Fuse Threshold controls shown in the 0.7.0 videos are gone.